Open the pod bay doors, HAL.

I once read somewhere that when you start a new notebook, the best thing you can do is scribble all over the first page right away. Otherwise, the risk is too high that you spend forever polishing the first words and the perfect handwriting before you dare to write down your first real thoughts. That is how I want to approach this blog, too: I am simply starting again.

Starting a blog in 2026? Really? That is so 1993! Exactly!

I probably owe it to my father and his time at Nixdorf that in the late 80s and early 90s I already got to play Sokoban and SimCity on my dad’s 386. I was lucky enough to experience the early days of public internet first-hand. While most of my classmates still had no access to the internet at all, I was already browsing IMDb, MTV, and Metager.

My computer science teacher knew his stuff, and we quickly started building our first websites, hosted on Geocities and Tripod with free de.vu domains. At first in HTML and CSS, later, thanks to Macromedia, in Flash. I spent countless hours on Spotleid, long before Reddit became one of the best places on the web. And even today I still catch myself checking funkreich every now and then to see whether something might be happening there again. Music, graffiti, and web culture used to overlap much more closely back then. Graffiti was a little too wet and cold for me, but I rarely missed a Dr.Web tutorial. It is a shame that the Wayback Machine did not cache images in those early years. That is why all that remains of our old sites are a few scraps of HTML.

By the end of the 90s, the internet had already become omnipresent. In the mornings, CDs were traded in the schoolyard, Napster was in full swing, and having a DSL connection was a real competitive advantage. In the afternoons, we would hang out in IRC channels and later on ICQ. I still know my ICQ number by heart. The big Y2K chaos never materialised, but we did get hit by an expensive dialer at home.

Even though Google and Friendster had already appeared on the horizon as early signs of the internet monopolies to come, the web around the turn of the millennium was, above all, an incredibly exciting collection of countless PHP forums and blogs. Since then, one could argue, not that much good has really happened.

Still starting a blog now?

And now? Starting a blog of my own? At a time when everyone hangs out on X, Instagram, and TikTok, and hardly anyone bothers typing a URL anymore because you can just ask AI directly instead? Maybe it is nostalgia. Or maybe it is because I have been waiting for months for the next post by Tim Urban on Wait But Why.

But yes, I am giving it another try. I am going to blog, completely against the trend, in the old-fashioned way, right here in my own words. A little about my projects, my experiences with AI, automation, the server under my desk, project work, danorama, kayaking, and my electronic drum kit.